Fossils of Jimbo the Supersaurus on exhibit

To answer Mike’s question from the last post, here’s a nice dorsal of Jimbo. All the material’s from the same quarry and has consistent preservation, and this dorsal is a monster. I didn’t try to measure it through the glass.

Two partial cervical vertebrae, with part of a little one in between them, and a sectioned rib up on the shelf. I didn’t try to measure these through the glass either, but I’d estimate that each of the cervical centra is a meter and change in length, and both were a few cm longer when complete.

I don’t know if this pneumatic dorsal rib was too big, too dense, or too expensive to CT scan, but Dave Lovelace and colleagues did the next best thing: they sectioned it with a big rock saw. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Next cabinet going around clockwise has these dorsal vertebrae and a couple of broken neural spine tops. The vertebra on the left is the one shown in lateral view at the top of this post.

A tibia and a fibula. This is where it gets a little weird. I measured the other fibula, not on display, as being 116cm long. That sounds big, but it’s only a few cm larger than the fibulae of CM 3018 or AMNH 6341. So either Jimbo was unusually short-legged for the size of its vertebrae, or these limb bones belong to a different individual.

A proximal caudal and a huge chevron in the next cabinet.

And the rest of the caudals in that cabinet, a selection from different spots down the tail, with chevrons.